The present invention relates to an ink-jet recording device for recording by jetting ink.
An ink-jet recording device supplies ink stored in an ink tank to an ink-jet recording head, pushes out and jets ink by predetermined quantity from a nozzle via a narrow passage formed in the ink-jet recording head, adheres it to a recording medium records and records. Fine dust, bubbles and others are mixed in ink supplied from an ink tank. Bubbles and dust also invade into the passage of ink by the replacement of ink tanks and others. Normally they are filtered by a filter and others, however, nevertheless, there is a case that dust and bubbles invade into an ink-jet recording head, bubbles greatly grow, they block a narrow passage and ink cannot be jetted. When a passage is blocked as described above, the phenomenon emerges as the defect of the quality of an image.
To maintain the quality of a recorded image, maintenance for removing dust and bubbles which invade into an ink-jet recording head as described above is essential. In maintenance, large quantity of ink is sucked by a pump and others from the side of a nozzle of an ink-jet recording head so as to exhaust dust and bubbles left inside together with the ink outside through a nozzle. The sucked ink is carried to an ink absorber, is impregnated and held. For the ink absorber, the one with large capacity is built in the body of a recording device to reduce the labor of replacement. Therefore, there is a problem that the recording device is large-sized. There is also a problem that maintenance in which ink is sucked is frequently executed and if the quantity of absorbed ink exceeds the capacity of an ink absorber, work for replacing ink absorbers is required. Further, as the absorbed ink is not utilized again and discarded as waste ink, there is a problem that the frequency of the replacement of ink tanks for black ink which is particularly high in the frequency of utilization is high and the running cost is high. To miniaturize the above ink absorber for waste ink and facilitate work for replacement, a method of being provided with an ink absorber to a head cartridge in addition to an ink tank is devised as a method disclosed in the Unexamined Japanese Patent Application Publication No. Hei 4-364960 for example. According to the above constitution, ink absorbers can be also replaced by work for replacing ink cartridges when ink in an ink tank is short and the work is facilitated. However, an ink absorber for waste ink still exists and a head cartridge is large-sized because volume for the ink absorber is required.
For a large-sized ink-jet recording device, there is also a method in which waste ink is not produced by sucking every color of ink used for recording and returning the sucked ink to an ink tank. However, according to the method, as a sucking mechanism and a mechanism for returning the sucked ink to an ink tank are required to be provided every color, there is a defect that the whole device becomes large-sized.